[MD] Sociability Re-examined

[david]

"There are no chains more vicious than the chains of biological necessity into
which every child is born. Society exists primarily to free people from these
biological chains."


"cannibalism, not cooperation, was a pre-society norm … American 
Indians … ambushed & tortured [other tribes] … maybe it is man’s 
basic goodness which invented social institutions to repress this kind 
of biological savagery in the first place."


"We must understand that when a society undermines 
intellectual freedom for its own purposes it is absolutely morally bad, 
but when it represses biological freedom for its own purposes it is 
absolutely morally good. These moral bads and goods are not just 
‘customs’. They are as real as rocks and trees."


Traditional religion fits neatly into this picture. Church morality, if you will, is almost entirely about controlling our biological appetites. "Society exists primarily to free people from these biological chains" and religion certainly played a role in this but the allure of fame and fortune also plays a major role. 


"Celebrity is the Dynamic Quality that primitive social patterns once 
used to organize themselves … an organizing force of the whole social 
level of evolution. Without this … advanced complex human societies 
might be impossible."



"… When you look back into the very first writing in the history of 
the western world … Babylon … they’re about celebrity: I, Hammurabi am 
the big wheel here. I have this many horses … concubines … slaves … oxen
 … I am one of the greatest … kings there ever was … The Pyramids were 
celebrity devices. All the statues … palaces … robes … jewels of social 
authority: those are just celebrity devices. The feathers of the Indian 
headdress. Children being told they would be struck blind if they ever 
accidentally looked at the emperor. All the Sirs & Lords & 
Reverends & Doctors of European address … badges & trophies … 
promotions up the business ladder … election to ‘high office … feuding 
and battling for prestige among academics and scientists … Celebrity.    Even a policeman’s uniform is a kind of celebrity … without celebrity
 nobody would take orders from anybody and there would be no way you 
could get the society to work … High school was really the place for 
celebrity … jocks out playing football … pom-pom girls … You can measure
 the quality of a university by comparing the relative strengths of the 
celebrity patterns and the intellectual patterns. You never got rid of 
the celebrities, even at the best universities, but there the 
intellectuals could ignore them and be in a class by themselves.  … the Metaphysics of Quality says that movement upward from the 
social mirrors of celebrity is a moral movement from a lower form of 
evolution to a higher one. People should go that way if they can."


These are not new ideas, really. Plato construed things this way in a kind of hierarchy of love. Those who love physical pleasure were the lowest, he thought, while those who seek fame and fortune were higher than the hedonists they still weren't as lofty as those who loved truth and wisdom, namely philosophers like himself. It's a wide-spread and well-known way of thinking about our situation. Pirsig is giving us his own version but the basic categories really shouldn't be contentious or confusing.

Sorry, but all these weird questions and bizarre suggestions about defining levels, adding levels, putting levels between levels, it's all just a bunch of boring nonsense that never, ever goes anywhere. Yawn. Please wake me when it's over.